Book Smart: The Extraordinary Library and Archives of Helen Drutt

They encircle her when she sits in her office. They have taken over the second-floor bathroom, where the fixtures have been removed to make way for bookshelves. The clawfoot bathtub could not be dislodged, so a bookshelf was fabricated around it.

Drutt has been described as the godmother of the field of crafts. Since the early 1970s, she has been among the leading advocates in the United States putting a spotlight on American crafts—with contemporary jewelry and ceramics a central focus—as well as introducing international artists to the American audience. Her roles have been many, including gallery director, curator, author, and educator.

Art historian Toni Greenbaum considers Drutt’s commitment to the field “unmatched”: She has educated a generation of scholars in the discipline, who have, in turn, enlightened others. She founded a groundbreaking gallery, honing collectors that are now, by their gifts, populating museums with seminal works. Through her personal charisma and genuine affection for the artists, curators, and connoisseurs, Drutt has fostered a community of advocates almost as passionate about the field as she is herself. [1]

Drutt’s home is imbued with the spirit of contemporary jewelry. Along the stairs are framed drawings by Manfred Bischoff, Claus Bury, Sharon Church, and Thomas Gentille. The dining room walls feature drawings by Gijs Bakker and a brooch installation by Kim Overstreet and Robin Kranitzky that celebrates Drutt’s ninetieth birthday. Even breakfast croissants are served with lemon jam made by Eleanor Moty.


From Drutt’s Archives: Letters from Gerd Rothmann
“THIS IS A CREDIT FOR A WONDERFUL DINNER A LA GERD,” reads a note that Gerd Rothmann wrote on top of a photograph of Drutt, who is placing a crown on the head of her late husband H. Peter Stern.
In a binder bursting with correspondence from Rothmann, there is also a sketch labeled “HANDS OF HELEN’S MOTHER: BROOCH, SILVER AND GOLD FINGERPRINTS,” for a piece Rothmann made for Drutt using casts of her mother’s fingerprints. One of Drutt’s most treasured pieces is a silver necklace made by Rothmann that features 137 thumbprints of Stern, who died in 2018.


Drutt initially wore contemporary jewelry because it was the most effective way of bringing attention to the field of crafts. Wearing an electroformed Stanley Lechtzin brooch became a way of encouraging inquiry, she explains. I couldn’t wear a pot. [2]

When she opened her eponymous gallery in 1973, it was one of the first in the country dedicated to modern and contemporary crafts. Over the next three decades, the gallery hosted more than 250 exhibitions. She brought to the United States the work of such pivotal contemporary jewelers as Robert Baines, Gijs Bakker, Peter Chang, Bruno Martinazzi, Wendy Ramshaw, and David Watkins.

And Drutt’s one-of-a-kind library, which stretches over three floors, spans the subjects of jewelry, textiles, ceramics, and wood alongside monographs on many disciplines. There are rare exhibition catalogs from all over the world, as well as thousands of slides and photographs documenting her visits to artists.

Filling the bookcases throughout the third floor are her archives, where more than five hundred binders—each labeled with the name of an artist or exhibition—overflow with exhibition materials that include price lists and images, as well as an untold number of letters, postcards, and drawings from artists. It’s all here, says Drutt. I saved everything.


Ornament As Art
Drutt, who celebrated her ninety-fifth birthday in November 2025, wants students and researchers to one day have access to her treasure trove of materials. To that end, she has willed her art books to Temple University’s Charles Library and her archives to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.

Books are permanent documentation of work and ideas, Drutt says. Emails come and go, but there’s nothing like having a book and opening it and studying it. Sharing her knowledge has been an essential part of Drutt’s life since 1973, when she developed and taught the first college-level course on the history of the craft movement after World War II at the Philadelphia College of Art. I am basically a teacher, Drutt says. That’s who I am.

Books have always played an essential role in Drutt’s life. She still has the copy of Aesop’s Fables she received at the age of seven, which she keeps close at hand. She brought many books home over the years from her travels to Europe. When she was asked to teach the course on crafts, she spent the summer developing a syllabus from scratch. There was no email, she points out. There was no internet. Books were my teachers. That’s how I learned about the field, and how I learned how to teach.


From Drutt’s Archives: Guest Book Entry by Claus Bury
German artist Claus Bury sat at Drutt’s dining room table for a full day writing in her guest book. He was chronicling the story behind every piece of his work in her collection, even pasting photographs in the book. One entry recalls his first meeting with Drutt, in a hotel room in New York City in 1973, where “she looked at my jewellery and bought her first ring and I received my first dollar cheque (felt very proud) on the spot.” He includes a drawing of the ring and a description: “Ring, gold, 750/000, Perspex acrylic, movable cloud.” Drutt recalls the moment: “I had just received a loan from the bank for $10,000, and the first check I wrote was to Claus for $400.”


Drutt always loved the arts, but her youthful efforts as a maker fizzled when, at the age of eighteen, she took a class with ceramicist Rudi Staffel as an undergraduate at the Tyler School of Art. Staffel instructed her to go home and read. Your hands will never do what your brain wants, Drutt recalls. (Decades later, she exhibited Staffel’s work in her gallery.)

My strength was not in creating paintings or drawings, Drutt says. My strength was in seeing. I had a good eye, and I still have a good eye.

Drutt shares her impeccable eye in the book Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection, written by Cindi Strauss, with an essay by Drutt, to accompany the 2007 exhibition of 275 pieces of Drutt’s jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Known as “the orange book” for its striking cover, the 528-page tome is considered an essential text about the field of contemporary jewelry.


Art as Ornament
The library Drutt has amassed in her home has an estimated twelve thousand books and close to one thousand exhibition catalogs. In addition to the room dedicated to books on jewelry, there are sections on ceramics, textiles, and wood; a room of exhibition catalogs; and a library dedicated to monographs about ceramicists, metalsmiths, painters, designers, architects, and others.

Her poetry library includes forty years of volumes by the winners of the Maurice English Poetry Award, which honors her late husband, who died in 1983. Those volumes will be donated to Poetry Ireland House in Dublin, set to open in 2026.

I have been obsessive about collecting books and nurturing a library that can be a resource for other people, Drutt says.

Drutt’s books are from all over the world—many of them rare, given that art books are often published in small numbers. There are books in Helen’s library that I had never seen before and was not aware existed, says Doug Bucci, a contemporary jewelry artist and the head of Temple’s Metals/Jewelry/CAD-CAM program. [3]

Drutt’s books will one day be accessible to Temple’s students and faculty, as well as the general public through interlibrary loan. They will be shelved together for browsing, and each will be identified with a bookplate as part of Drutt’s collection.

Drutt uses her library every day, referencing works for two major research projects. One is about the emergence and resurgence of the craft movement in Philadelphia from 1976 to 2026; the other is a chronology of exhibitions at her gallery and major international events, alongside biographies of figures in craft. The library is so much an extension of her, Bucci says. She can tell you what room a book is in, what it is next to. The library is maintained by artist Ken Derengowski and research assistant Marina Kato-Hurwitz.

Many of Drutt’s books were signed by the artists, with a letter or fax preserved between the pages. But the bulk of her correspondence is on the third floor, where the rooms have floor-to-ceiling bookshelves overflowing with letters and other materials from hundreds of artists.


From Drutt’s Archives: Birthday Card from Merrily Tompkins
“Dear Darling Helen, I have kissed this page 75 times in honor of your birthday.” So begins a poster-sized birthday card from jewelry artist Merrily Tompkins, which is covered with lipstick kisses and framed on Drutt’s wall. “I had to re-apply lipstick every four kisses, so you should understand, by that effort, the scope of my affection for you,” writes Tompkins, who died in 2018. Tompkins lived in Washington State, so the close friends kept in touch with letters and phone calls. Tompkins’s love and appreciation for Drutt continues: “Your determined, stubborn faith in me as an artist (as a person even) worth her salt has more than once given me the courage to suit-up and face the void with optimistic purpose, knowing you were in my corner.”


There are six-inch-thick binders teeming with correspondence, each letter and postcard in a plastic sleeve, Bucci says. There are letters from my heroes in the world of art and craft. There are birthday wishes and announcements of the birth of a child. What is really beautiful is that there isn’t a separation between business and friendship. Many artists have become Drutt’s close friends and often stay with her, sometimes for weeks or months.

There is correspondence with scores of the most prominent jewelry artists of the last half century: Joyce Scott (four binders), Tone Vigeland (six binders), Deganit Stern Schocken (four binders), Sharon Church (five binders), Wendy Ramshaw (eight binders), Bernhard Schobinger (two binders), and many more. The contents of Drutt’s archives will one day be available to the public by appointment at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

Peeking into a binder for Gijs Bakker, one finds price lists and inventories as well as photographs of his 2007 birthday party and a poem Drutt wrote for him when he moved into a new house. Even today, when so much communication is digital, Drutt is known for sending handwritten postcards and letters (though she is also adept at email).

Drutt’s closets are filled with thousands of slides—souvenirs of the days before the internet, when artists mailed slides to galleries. In the 1970s, while putting together her first syllabus, Drutt would write to artists to request ten slides of their work, offering to trade ten slides she had in exchange.

Her slides from more than one hundred prominent artists have recently been digitized, with boxes and boxes more to go. A quick glance at her digital records yields snapshots of Drutt visiting Bruno Martinazzi’s home in Italy and photos of Merrily Tompkins in her studio and home in Ellensburg, Washington.

Drutt has long shared the riches of her library and archives by making them accessible to researchers by permission. And Drutt has been giving away duplicate copies of books. If you want your field to grow, you share information—you don’t hold it for yourself, she says. She has sent books to organizations all over the country, from the Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Montana, to Brooklyn Metal Works.


Christina Brinzac reading Martinazzi edited by Carla Gallo Barbisio (1990) in the Brooklyn Metal Works library. Photo Credit: Alexandro Manno.
A Gift Grows in Brooklyn: Drutt Enhances Library at Brooklyn Metal Works.
In 2017, Helen Drutt called Arnoldsche Art Publishers and asked them to send one copy of each book currently in print to Brooklyn Metal Works (BKMW)—and to send her the bill. She sent another batch in 2020 to the studio and educational lab, for a total of eighty-one books.
Helen has recognized the value of books as a historical legacy for the future, says Dirk Allgaier, managing director of Arnoldsche (a). Drutt also gave BKMW duplicates of books from her library, as well as rare exhibition catalogs. Once catalogued, the books will be available to the public at BKMW’s library, and some catalogs and books are being sold to raise money for a new residency program at BKMW. BKMW cofounder Brian Weissman says Drutt’s contributions have been instrumental in building an incredible resource for everyone who visits—students, members, teachers, and researchers alike. (b)a) Dirk Allgaier, email correspondence with author, June 11, 2025. b) Brian Weissman, email correspondence with author, June 13, 2025.


Sharing knowledge has always been an essential part of Helen’s work, says Karen Davidov, founder of The Jewelry Library in New York City, which received books from Drutt’s collection. [4]

Drutt’s legacy, already formidable, is buttressed by the wealth of material she has collected, which is destined to be an essential resource for those who study contemporary craft for decades to come. As Drutt pages through a binder of Gerd Rothmann’s correspondence, reading bits from his letters and admiring drawings he made for her, she is struck by it all: It’s a lot of life, isn’t it?


Notes:
[1] Toni Greenbaum, email correspondence with author, June 4, 2025.
[2] Helen Drutt, interview with author, May 14, 2025.
[3] Doug Bucci, interview with author, April 18, 2025.
[4] Karen Davidov, email correspondence with author, June 20, 2025.
 

About the author

Jennifer Altmann is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times’s Style section, Art Jewelry Forum, and many other outlets. At her writing workshops she helps jewelers craft their artist statements. She chronicles the contemporary jewelry scene on Instagram at @jenniferaltmann

Connect with her at jenniferaltmann.com